Final Inquiries (39 page)

Jamie knelt next to her, and cleared his throat. "Ah, Ms. Weldon? Linda Weldon?"

It was a very tender moment, even a romantic one, Hannah decided. The brave, gentle, and handsome young police officer rescuing the terrified young woman from the underground bunker. And it lasted until the split second when Linda Weldon woke up, saw Jamie, and screamed.

They should have had Brox there, but there had been no contact since Brox had called them from the Kendari aircar. They should have had Zhen Chi there, but it seemed she was, in spite of it all, still in the med lab in the Kendari embassy compound. The ambassador should have been there, but there could be no disturbing him--and they were very definitely on the clock, with the hours until the Vixa's evac deadline slipping away. They settled for setting up every sort of recorder they could find in the same conference room they had been using.

"All right," said Jamie as he handed her a glass of water. "There's a lot going on around here, and there isn't much time. I'm not going to lie to you--I haven't the slightest doubt that you're going to have to go through all this again--quite possibly several times. But we need to get through the first time now."

"It's--it's bad, isn't it?" she asked.

"Yes," said Hannah. "Yes it is. The situation is complicated, and very serious."

"My father--do you know--is he--is he all right?"

"Your father is fine," said Hannah. "We'll let him know you're safe." She prayed that Jamie had the sense not to tell this semihysterical girl that her father was thirty meters away, just outside, waiting for her. Then they'd get into a bargaining session.
Let me see my father first, and then I'll tell you everything.
But the first sight of her father would make her feel safer, less vulnerable, less obliged to tell them what they needed. And Jamie might well give in.

A glance at Jamie told Hannah her fears weren't misplaced. She gave him a quick, imperceptible shake of the head to warn him off, and he nodded back just as imperceptibly.

The boy needed to get out more. He always did fall to pieces and get all overprotective when it came to interrogating young women. And this one would be pretty enough, if she got cleaned up and put in fresh clothes. She was just eighteen, according to what her father said, and she'd inherited his bright red hair, though little else of his appearance. Her face was streaked with tears, and a little grubby-looking. She was thin, pale, gangly and coltish, and even looked a little fretful--but many a lovely young swan grew out of an duckling uglier than this one. Hannah fought down a smile.
Cool it, Wolfson,
she told herself.
Are you feeling maternal, or just a wee bit jealous? Face it. Our dear little baby agent is all grown-up and getting interested in girls.

She was tempted to step in and take over. But it was too late for that already. Weldon had zeroed right in on Jamie. He had to take the lead on this one.

"Look, let's just start with you telling us what happened, in your own words. How was it you started up at the embassy?"

"There--there were a bunch of us. It was something to
do
instead of hanging around the residential compounds they had for us, listening to our parents argue the same politics over and over."

"But, ah, no offense, pretty much every one of the groups that the Vixa brought in is considered radical in one direction or another. Why did the embassy let you work here?"

"We weren't spies or anything like that. They never let us near anything confidential. Half of what I did was work in Zhen Chi's garden, or in the motor pool. Stuff like that. And the ambassador kept saying that if we saw what was really going on, what the embassy really did, what the Vixa and the Kendari and everybody were really like, got a different perspective, then maybe that would do us some good."

"And did it?"

She shrugged in classic teenage fashion as she stared fixedly at the water glass and fiddled with it. "I don't know. I guess."

"But the joint ops center is nothing
but
sensitive material," Hannah objected. "What were you doing
here
?"

"Finding an empty desk," she said. "Simple as that. Madame Mutambara, the political officer, had just finished up doing this big report on Vixan history and politics, and asked me to proofread it. There wasn't any room in the pol office, so she walked me in here, and said no one ever used half the space in the place. She told me to leave the work in the room when I was done for the day and that then I could come back to it in the morning. She showed me how to key myself out when I was done, and left me to it."

"Where, exactly, were you working?" Hannah asked.

Linda hooked her thumb out the door. "Down the end of this hall. Third or fourth door on the left. All the stuff I was working out still ought to be there if you want proof or something."

"We'll check on that later," said Jamie. "When did all this happen? When did Madame Mutambara let you in?"

Another teenage shrug. "They use a funny clock system around here. It was about 1500 hours."

Nearly five hours before 1950, the best estimate on the time of the murder. And they had only done that fast-scan check of the surveillance video for the last
four
hours before.

"So you sat down and got to work at about 1500," said Jamie. "Then what?"

"I worked," she said, as if that was too obvious a question. "I thought it was going to be dull, dull, dull, but there was all sorts of cool, creepy, interesting stuff in the report about their biology and history and stuff. I sort of got hooked on it, and just kept going at it."

"Until when?"

"Maybe 2230 or so."

"You worked through for six and half hours?"

"Well, I went to the bathroom once or twice. It's right next to the office I was in. You can go look. And I brought my own dinner." She paused, and looked from one of them to the other. "I know that's a little weird, staying alone checking a book for that long. But I don't
get
much time alone. The residential compounds are really crowded. Not much peace and quiet. Besides, the stuff in the book was really
interesting.
"

"Did anyone see you, or hear you while you were here? Did you see anyone, or hear anything?"

"You mean, alibis and stuff?" She shook her head "no" very solemnly. "I didn't see anyone at all. I heard voices once or twice, from the big room in the middle, but just ordinary talking. No shouting or fights or anything. And I heard the outside doors opening and shutting. They make a lot of noise, big rattling booms. But that's just ordinary too. I didn't pay it any attention."

And when they were shut, the doors made for superb soundproofing.

"Okay, keep going."

"Well, finally, I
did
check the time, and realized that I had been there way longer than I had planned, and that my dad would be getting worried."

"When was that?"

"Like I said, about 2230. Yeah. It was just about then, because I remember thinking I only had half an hour until my curfew--and that's at 2300."

Hannah worked through the sequence of events in her head. By 2300, Emelza had probably been dead for more than three hours already. Brox and Milkowski had both been in and out of the building--some of those booming door noises Weldon had heard. By 2300, the lockdown was already well under way, and the joint ops center was sealed and locked from both human and Kendari sides.

"So I straightened up the papers, and got my things together, and walked down the main hall--and--and--"

"It's the tough part, Linda, but you have to go on."

"And--and I saw him there."

"Him? Who?" Hannah and Jamie exchanged sudden panicky looks. Another dead Kendari? A male? Was their case going to take another hairpin turn?

"The Kendari. The dead Kendari. I don't know the name. Dad didn't like me talking to them, so I never really met any of the ones here. But he was dead! Slumped over on his side, dead!"

Hannah let out a silent sigh of relief. No, not another, male, dead Kendari. Just an ignorant, thoughtless teenage human who couldn't tell the difference. Probably she assumed all dogs were boys and all cats were girls.

"How could you tell?" Jamie asked. "I mean, ah, that the Kendari was dead?"

"He wasn't
moving,
" she said, suddenly agitated again. "Not breathing or anything. And there was this sort of slime on his ears and mouth and stuff. But I thought that--that maybe he was just asleep, or passed out or something. I--I--"

She burst into tears.

"Drink some water," Jamie said. "Take it easy. We're almost there. You what?"

"I--I touched him. Sort of poked at him. Pushed at him with my fingers, and then with my whole hand, pretty hard. He was
cold,
and he didn't move--and he was dead." Tears were running down her cheeks. "And then--then I realized that my dad--I love my dad, he's a good guy and everything--but he
hates
the Kendari. Says all sorts of terrible things about them trying to trick us and attack us and how we have to get them before they get us--and there I was in this super-secure place with a dead one, and they'd say I killed him because of my dad--"

She stopped, gulped air, and grabbed at the edge of the table, as if she was afraid of flying off into space. "I tried to get out on the human-side doors, but the keycode Madame Mutambara gave me wouldn't work. It would just flash ENHANCED SECURITY MODE IN EFFECT CONTACT SECURITY OFFICE. I--I almost did that. But then I thought of my dad again, and the dead body, and started thinking about how they--you, I guess, would think I did it--and--and just went a little panicky-crazy, I guess. I decided to hide. I went to the survival bunkers in the basement."

"How did you know about the bunkers?"

"Safety orientation," she said. "They made everyone take it who was going to have to work at the embassy. They even walked us through one of them. I thought it was cool--back then. A private dungeon. Plenty of peace and quiet. And the longer I did it, the longer I stayed down there--the worse it got. The more I was sure that you'd find me, sooner or later, and figure that I must have done it, because why else would I be hiding? But I didn't do it. I didn't."

"Okay," said Hannah, a little harshly. "We got that. Quick follow-ups. Did you see or notice anything around the body? Anything odd or unusual."

"Just the dead alien! That was unusual enough for me!"

She burst into tears again, and Hannah gave it up. She stepped out into the hall while Jamie calmed the girl down again. Linda Weldon wasn't going to be describing broken coffee mugs or appearance of stains on the carpet or hard flooring. It didn't matter. They had confirmation of all that evidence, and her story fit into the narrative perfectly.

Hannah walked down the hallway, idly checked the layout of the rooms, and found the one with a pile of reference materials and a neat stack of printed pages. She checked a page or two, and sure enough, it was an historic analysis of the Vixa, with neat proofreading marks on nearly every page. Weldon had done good work. Madame Mutambara would want to recover it before the evacuation.

Weldon had as much as said she was alone in the same building with the victim for an extended period that included the time when the murder must have taken place. That meant they had her placed in the main ops center, just at the time of the murder, with nothing to stop her from killing Emelza 401. All she had to do was take a break from reading her fascinating Big Book of the Vixa, commit the murder, then go back to her work for however long she judged would best suit the cover story. And it didn't hurt at all that her father was her father. All they had to do was uncover one lie in her story, catch her being wrong in one significant detail, and they'd have themselves a big, fat, juicy, very solid suspect that would make everyone very happy indeed.

The only trouble was, Hannah didn't buy it at all.

Hannah stepped back out into the hallway and spotted Jamie just coming out of the conference room. They walked toward each other. "Hey, Hannah. Well, there's our handprint."

"Yeah."

"Under the circumstances, do you see any real harm in letting her see her father?"

Hannah thought for a moment. "No. The hell with interrogation procedure, and the hell with not liking Daddy's politics. Let's be decent human beings instead of cops, just for a moment. Go get her, and let's take her out to her dad."

"Right. Thanks."

Hannah waited for him to retrieve the wan, tired, frightened girl. They were just about to take her through the inner human-side doors of the ops center when the interlock system kicked in.

"Oops," said Jamie. "We're stuck here for a minute."

"What? Why?" asked Weldon.

"The Kendari-side doors are in use," said Jamie. "They rigged the system so only one set of doors can be used at once, and only one door on each side can be opened at the same time. Paranoid security thing to keep us from rushing straight through the building and attacking them, or vice versa."

"I don't want to see any Kendari!" Weldon protested. "I don't!"

Hannah bit down on the half dozen or so replies she was tempted to make. They wouldn't do any good anyway.

"We don't always get to choose what we see," Jamie said.

Weldon did her best to prove him wrong by covering her eyes with her hands and turning her back on the door--and bursting into tears yet again.
Reminds me of her daddy's politics. Nothing is so big or important that you can't pretend it isn't there, if you try hard enough.
Hannah knew that the girl had been through a hard time, but she had just about had her fill of Linda Weldon.

The Kendari-side inner door rolled open. Brox, Remdex, Flexdal, and Zhen Chi came through the door, Zhen Chi carrying the same large box that Hannah had handed to her earlier that day. "We need you two, and the ambassador, in the conference room, right away," said Zhen Chi. "And yes, it's important enough to interrupt evac preparation. I'm pretty sure we found what you expected."

Hannah stepped forward eagerly. If Zhen Chi was right, that would be the best news she'd heard in a while.
And maybe the worst news too, but one disaster at a time.
Hannah nodded at Jamie. "Let's get her out of here, then go find Stabmacher. We can get him up to speed on what Weldon--Miss Weldon--told us on the way." She turned to the new arrivals. "A lot's been happening today," she said. "We'll get you caught up as soon as we're back."